When Hamid Karzai returned to Afghanistan to oppose the Taliban early last month and press for a new government, it was a move of potential significance because he and his tribe have played such a central role in Afghan history, analysts said yesterday.
Karzai is the leader of an influential clan of the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's long-dominant ethnic group, they said. His clan is especially strong in and around Kandahar, the southern city that is the center of Taliban power.
Analysts said this explains why his firefight on Thursday with Taliban forces is different from earlier clashes between the Taliban and opposition commanders in the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan. Unlike Abdul Haq, a Pashtun warlord who was captured and executed by the Taliban last week, Karzai has a natural following and this may have helped him avoid capture, they said.
"If Karzai could form a political base that can be mobilized in the heartland of the Taliban, it would be highly significant," said Barnett R. Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation of New York University.
"The leadership he represents has been so broken down, and it will be very difficult to revive it," Rubin said. "But he represents a continuity with Afghanistan's past, and that has definite power."
Karzai was selected as leader of the Popalzai clan in 1999, after the previous chief, his father, was assassinated in Pakistan. The Popalzais are leaders of the Durrani tribe, which established the first Afghan empire in the 1760s, with its capital in Kandahar. The descendants of those rulers led Afghanistan almost without interruption until 1973, when King Mohammed Zahir Shah was deposed by his cousin.
The Durranis and another sub-group, the Ghilzais, together make up much of the ethnic Pashtun belt in southern and eastern Afghanistan that is key to unseating the Taliban. The Taliban is largely Pashtun -- an ancient group that traces its genealogy back to a companion of the prophet Muhammad -- and analysts say any future Afghan government will have to include substantial Pashtun representation to be stable.
Karzai, who was a deputy minister in the Afghan government that was formed in the early 1990s after the withdrawal of Soviet forces, could offer some of that stability, analysts said.
But Karzai comes with handicaps, too. Many of the educated, upper- and middle-class Afghans whom he represents have been killed or exiled in two decades of civil wars, and have been eclipsed by the mullahs and clerics. The religious rulers of the Taliban have always regarded the old ruling elites as especially dangerous rivals, and have been ruthless in undermining them and turning villagers against them.
Also, Karzai has lived since the mid-1990s in Pakistan and traveled often to the United States, something that could cause him difficulty now, Rubin said. Although he maintained his ties better than most Afghans who left the country, he said, his challenge in Afghanistan is stark. "His group has to grow, or it will die," Rubin said.
According to Omar Samad, a commentator with the independent Afghan Information Center in Washington, Karzai has been engaging in traditional Afghan politics since he returned to the country on Oct. 8 by meeting with local elders over tea. Karzai is promoting the calling of a national gathering, or loya jirga , that would be led by the exiled king, who has been living in Rome since 1973.
Samad said that form of governing is radically different from the Taliban approach, which is rooted in Islam and gives power to the mullahs. He said that most members of the Taliban come from poor and uneducated families that had little influence in the traditional social and economic structure of Afghanistan, and that many of them lost their fathers during the wars.
As refugees in Pakistan, most were brought up in religious schools, or madrassahs, and religious ties became more important than traditional tribal ones.
"The Karzai family is very important in Kandahar, but the city today is not the same as two months ago or certainly 10 years ago," Samad said. "The elite has left, and what remains in Kandahar is the poorest people, the least informed and the easiest to manipulate. This makes the effort even more difficult."
But Karzai does have the benefit of tradition and influence -- his father was the head of the important Kandahar shura, or governing body, in the early 1990s -- and Karzai knows how to work with village leaders.
While analysts emphasize the importance of ethnic, tribal and clan loyalties in Afghanistan, some Afghan figures say that emphasis is part of what has been destroying the country for years. Hamid Karzai's brother, Qayum Karzai, who lives in the Washington area, says that Pakistan in particular has sought to divide Afghanistan by insisting that Pashtuns must rule.
"Any patriotic Afghan will tell you that the struggle is not based on ethnicity or tribal affiliation but, instead, on the principle of Afghan independence," Qayum Karzai said. "If anybody resorts to this Pashtun or non-Pashtun formula, it is designed to poison the resistance movement."
Pakistan also has a large Pashtun population, and has been historically worried that it might try to leave Pakistan to form a greater "Pashtunistan" with Afghan Pashtuns. The Afghan royal family has long been associated with the idea, and the Afghan leader who deposed Zahir Shah, Mohammed Daoud, actively encouraged Pakistani Pashtuns to think in those terms. Pakistani leaders have never forgotten that.
Karzai and other tribal leaders like him generally join resistance groups associated with the royal family and so have not been favorites of Pakistan, which has funded and supported the fundamentalist Islamic groups.
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